A fight with a cannon By Victor Hugo

La Vieuville was suddenly cut short by a cry of despair, and at the
same time a noise was heard wholly unlike any other sound. The cry and
sounds came from within the vessel.

The captain and lieutenant rushed
toward the gun-deck, but could not get down. All the gunners were pouring
up in dismay.

Something terrible had just happened.

One of the carronades
of the battery, a twenty-four pounder, had broken loose.

This is the
most dangerous accident that can possibly take place on shipboard. Nothing
more terrible can happen to a sloop of war in open sea and under full
sail.

A cannon that breaks its moorings suddenly becomes some strange, supernatural
beast. It is a machine transformed into a monster. That short mass on
wheels moves like a billiard-ball, rolls with the rolling of the ship,
plunges with the pitching, goes, comes, stops, seems to meditate, starts
on its course again, shoots like an arrow from one end of the vessel
to the other, whirls around, slips away, dodges, rears, bangs, crashes,
kills, exterminates. It is a battering ram capriciously assaulting a
wall. Add to this the fact that the ram is of metal, the wall of wood.

It is matter set free; one might say, this eternal slave was avenging
itself; it seems as if the total depravity concealed in what we call
inanimate things has escaped, and burst forth all of a sudden; it appears
to lose patience, and to take a strange mysterious revenge; nothing
more relentless than this wrath of the inanimate. This enraged lump
leaps like a panther, it has the clumsiness of an elephant, the nimbleness
of a mouse, the obstinacy of an ox, the uncertainty of the billows,
the zigzag of the lightning, the deafness of the grave. It weighs ten
thousand pounds, and it rebounds like a child's ball. It spins and then
abruptly darts off at right angles.